As Much Sweetness As I Can Decently Manage

I am so good at feeling guilty.

It's been a long time since God delivered a message directly to my face or to my inbox, but last week it happened. An old church friend reached out to let me know that God had told her to tell me that I was reaping what I'd sown re: lesbianism, and that's how come COVID is still messing with me all these years after I first got it. Long COVID is not a multi-systemic medical issue with limited epidemiological understanding and multiple pathophysiological mechanisms; it's a faith issue, is what my old friend said.

In fact, she was thrilled to hear that I'd gotten COVID and then Long COVID because it meant Jesus was finally moving on me. I left the Baptist church two decades ago to pursue a life of socialism, witchcraft, etc. and finally my reckoning had come. She was, quite frankly, pleased as punch. 

My friend said that God told her to tell me that all I had to do was get right with him and my Long COVID would be cured. Gone in an instant. I simply need to divorce my wife, leave our family behind, repent, return to church, find a husband, and my suffering will be over. I was surprised to learn that God is still obsessed with me finding a husband. It seems like he'd be a little more concerned with genocides and natural disasters, and a little less bothered by whether or not I had a man in my life. But who has known the mind of the Lord, right? I mean, besides the Apostle Paul, who wrote letters to churches all the time about how you can't know what's in God's brain, and then immediately followed it with pages and pages about what he was sure was in God's brain. And also all of the people who have ever delivered me a message God beamed from his mind into their minds.

My old friend also said, "One other thing. If you stop with the gay stuff, it probably would help the hurricane situation." Which, funnily enough, is the exact opposite of the last message someone gave me from God which was that God was using climate change to hasten the return of Jesus so he could go on ahead and install his kingdom on the earth. So, trying to stop climate change was trying to stop God's righteous judgment. And, therefore, voting for Obama made me both “an unrepentant heathen and an idiot.”

I was in middle school, attending a tent revival, the first time I watched a sweaty preacher scream at someone using a wheelchair to get up and walk, just hollering and wiping at his brow with a cloth handkerchief, yelling that God wanted that person to STAND UP, that their lack of faith was keeping them in that chair. The preacher even sprinkled seeds onto the woman. Not as some kind of herbal remedy or anything like that, but as proof that she didn't have even the faith of one of those tee-tiny spores, because: "Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you." And she was no mountain! She was just a woman! She only needed faith that was like three percent the size of a mustard seed! Like, half a grain of sand! Maybe smaller!

If you didn't grow up in the evangelical Christian church, you're probably not accustomed to people telling you their opinion on your business as if they've had a lengthy chat about it with Jesus. But it's regular old real life in the Baptist church. Anyone you know could walk up to you at any time and deliver the most ignorant, irrational, hurtful bullshit you have ever heard and will never forget with the stone cold arrogance of someone who truly believes they have a mandate from God to say what they're saying to you. 

I'm very good at feeling guilty, and I've gotten even better at it since I got Long COVID. Guilty that I don't make as much money as I used to, not nearly as much as my wife; guilty that I can't do as much housework or yard work as I used to; guilty that I can't talk on the phone because verbal communication turns my brain into potato soup; guilty that I can't attend in-person events, even really special and important ones, because no one's taking COVID precautions — and nothing makes me feel guiltier than overdoing it and crashing out and ending up stuck back in bed. Because if I very, very strictly pace myself, I don't crash. So if I do crash, it's all my fault, all my fault, all my fault. (Even though the line between crashing and not crashing can be one load of laundry or five minutes on Zoom.) 

I was lying on the couch earlier this week in the middle of a full-on crash caused by doing a favor for my landlord that I knew I shouldn't have done the whole time I was doing it. I had body aches, a fever, a cough, all Post-Exertional Malaise symptoms for me. I was flopped out there, feeling awful, thinking about how I should've said no to my landlord, how annoying it is that I still struggle to say no to people when they ask me to do something that will hurt me, how I have got to toughen up, how so many of my crashes come from my own weak-willed people-pleasing, and on and on. 

I've been really down on myself lately. It started with losing my debit card during a neurocognitive funk and spiraled out until I was bawling into a delivery cheeseburger because I forgot to tell the restaurant no onions and I hate onions and it was covered in onions. I hid my face inside my t-shirt, snorfle-sobbing about, "It's all my fault! Why is my brain broken? Why am I so dumb? Just the stupidest shit! All of the time! My debit card! These onions!" My wife started with rubbing my back and saying, "Babe, it's okay! It's not a big deal! We'll get another cheeseburger!" And then wrapping her whole body around me, begging me to stop being so mean to myself. 

"Where is this coming from?" she asked, near tears herself. "Did something happen? Did someone say something to you?" 

Yes? And no? No one said anything to me that I actually believe. But, then, people I love believe it — or something like it. That I am both a symbol and a harbinger of God's judgment. That I can control my chronic illnesses, and maybe even the weather. It's silly. It's so, so, so silly. It's also baked into me: the memories of preachers yelling at those disabled people, while everyone in the congregation watched on like reality TV; endless sermons about how disability exists so God can show his power, if we'll let him; the pounding relentless message that God wants us to be whole and being whole is being able-bodied. I honestly hadn't even realized all that stuff was hiding inside me — the alchemy of shame — until my old friend emailed me. Her message made me feel like a little kid: meek, afraid, helpless. 

I decided the move was to get a message directly from a different deity. And so I picked up A Burst of Light: and Other Essays for the tenth time, probably. Audre Lorde. Legally blind, breast cancer, liver cancer. Here is a woman who knew something about faith and fire, despair and disability. A woman who knew as much as there is to know about those things maybe. 

Near the end of her life she wrote: 

I have done good work. There is a hell of a lot more I have to do. And sitting here tonight in this lovely green park in Berlin, dusk approaching and the walking willows leaning over the edge of the pool caressing each other’s fingers, birds birds birds singing under and over the frogs, and the smell of new-mown grass enveloping my sad pen, I feel I still have enough moxie to do it all, on whatever terms I’m dealt, timely or not. Enough moxie to chew the whole world up and spit it out in bite-sized pieces, useful and warm and wet and delectable because they came out of my mouth.

From my spot on the couch, I read and read and read. I napped and I napped and I read. And then I quoted Audre Lorde only when I emailed my old friend back: 

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes — everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!

I can’t control my body. I certainly can’t control the weather. But by god I am going to write fire until it comes out of my noseholes.